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As Olivia Pierson wrote for The Good Oil this week, the media campaign against Donald Trump in 2016 was “an obvious psychological operation play itself out in media, in real time”. It was, Pierson says, the first time she had really noticed such a phenomenon in operation. It certainly wasn’t the last.
If the Covid madness wasn’t enough, the media are back for Trump Derangement 2.0. Even conservative media. Of course, despite the paranoid gibbering of the left, the Australian is very much a ‘broad-church’ paper, even publishing geriatric communists like Phillip Adams. Like most supposedly conservative institutions these days, it also boasts(?) a roster of dripping-wet wannabe Greens.
Like the author of this anti-Trump Jeremiad.
Make no mistake, Trump is an utterly unworthy presidential candidate and a truly appalling and despicable person. He was found guilty on 34 criminal counts of falsifying business records related to hush-money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels, found liable for sexual assault and defamation of E. Jean Carroll in a civil case, and twice impeached by the House of Representatives.
Well, whoop-de-doo. No mention that the criminal charges were obviously drummed up on the flimsiest of technicalities and are almost certain to be overturned following the Supreme Court’s reaffirmation of the longstanding principle of qualified immunity. Nor that both that and the Carroll case were pursued in a fiercely Democratic jurisdiction by Democratic prosecutors.
This was all, of course, of a piece with the Democrats who, under Barack Obama, weaponised multiple arms of the state, such as the IRS, in order to pursue and persecute political opponents.
Which makes Bramston’s next paragraph a masterclass in ‘pot, kettle, black’ selective myopia.
[Trump] undermined faith in the democratic process […] He has contempt for the rule of law and democracy, and would seek to use authoritarian powers if re-elected.
This is the same garbage script we were fed, ad nauseum, in 2016. It was all a tissue of lies and projected fever-dreams. It never happened – until 2021. As one commentator observed, “The current party who uses the FBI as their own gestapo are claiming the other party will use the FBI as their personal gestapo if they get in office.”
In 2021, the new regime surrounded the nation’s capital for months with concrete and barbed wire and thousands of troops personally vetted for loyalty to the regime. The Democrats then undertook a systematic purge of the military, followed by a re-education campaign for the remainders.
Naturally, no TDS Jeremiad is complete without a litany of distortions and outright lies.
Trump incited the riot at the US Capitol that resulted in death and destruction.
This is simply untrue. As the record shows, Trump emphasised the necessity of peaceful demonstration. The only death was a protester: a female military veteran shot from behind a door by a guard who had previously been reprimanded for poor gun safety.
The ‘destruction’ amounted to little more than a few broken windows. On the other hand, repeated riots instigated by Democrat politicians and activists caused the most extensive property damage from civil unrest in US history, including burning historic buildings in the White House precinct and trying to tear down fences around the White House, prompting the Secret Service to rush the First Family to a bunker.
Bramston’s preferred candidate, Kamala Harris, was instrumental in raising bail funds to free the arrested rioters.
Which makes his next whinge doubly hypocritical:
Trump has spoken of […] pardoning more than 1000 people convicted over the Capitol riot.
Those would be the legions of ordinary Americans, including little old ladies, who merely followed the guards who ushered them into the Capitol building, waving American flags and gawking like tourists. Most were convicted in Soviet-style show trials, where hours of exculpatory video evidence was denied.
Oh, you know the lies and distortions aren’t done, yet.
If this is not enough, what should persuade Americans not to return Trump to power is character. He has boasted about sexually assaulting women, made fun of people with disabilities, accused migrants of eating dogs and cats, called Harris “retarded”, insisted Obama was not born in the US, promised to “lock up” Hillary Clinton, and dismissed many who worked for him as “dumb” and “stupid” and “traitors” to their country.
Most of these are frankly lies or deliberate, pearl-clutching distortions of typical campaign hyperbole. Did Trump lock up Clinton when he was in power? What does Bramston make of multiple senior Democrats, including Obama, using far more violent and threatening language and arguably inciting multiple assassination attempts on Trump?
The ‘birther’ smear was, in fact, the creation of the Clinton campaign and Trump only ever referred to it once, by pointing out that it could simply be cleared up with a birth certificate.
And ‘migrants’ have undeniably been eating cats. There is clear video evidence, as well as multiple independent eyewitness reports. As journalist Tim Pool repeatedly says, ‘the media are LYING’.
Especially when they claim, against all evidence that, under Biden and Harris, ‘the US economy, in terms of growth, jobs, incomes, profits and stocks, has rarely performed better’. Ask any American whether they really are better off now than they were five years ago.
The lies go into overdrive when Bramston tries to hype the awful Kamala Harris.
She is a conventional major party nominee, with a pathway from prosecutor to attorney-general, senator and Vice-President. Her views are within mainstream centre-left tradition.
By contrast, her record shows that she is easily the most far-left Democratic nominee in history. Even ‘fact checkers’ have to admit it. As Newsweek points out, Harris is to the left of even open socialist Bernie Sanders.
Stick a fork in the arse of the mainstream media – they’re done.
